Men Don’t Need Their Own ‘Affirmative Action’

Article here. Excerpt:

'Three months after the fall of race-based affirmative action, the academic world is still wrestling with questions of who does — and doesn’t — deserve a tip on the admissions scale: from athletes, legacies, children of donors, and children of faculty (who collectively comprise 30 percent of Harvard’s student body), to men.

Across the nation’s collegiate classrooms, women outnumber men three to two. Of course, this ratio does not yet reflect the growing number of students who identify outside of the gender binary. But still, it is significant — and for some admissions offices, alarming.

As a Board, we’ve decided firmly in favor of race-based affirmative action and staunchly against legacy admissions. An admissions boost for men may appear to align with our appeals to a diverse student body in our defense of race-based college admissions.

But these struggles for educational equity are not equal.

Affirmative action is primarily beneficial because it is reparative. The policy boosts opportunities for applicants that have historically faced systemic barriers to higher education and its premiums.

Men do not qualify as such applicants. Colleges like Harvard admitted only men for centuries. But even in more recent history, though fewer men have been attending college than women since the 1980s, they remain severely overrepresented in the positions of power that many leverage higher education to achieve.'